Meeting Notes 2017 05 16

Facilitator - mitch notes - lizzie

short intros! less than a minute a piece. name, don't have to say anything.

mitch - founder of noisebridge from back in 2007 justin - thought it would be fun to come by. photographer and science alex - is alex matt - working towards grappling with technology for posthuman existence sofie - sweden stockholm, works at a makerspace there (crowdfunded) and makers of sweden. trying to get more organized. curious and doing a phd about making. violet - makerspeace in shenzen. in town for this makerfaire and wanted to see noisebridge. dario - musician - come here for vibes and chill ? - have been here a handful of times, wants to be more involved trent - network engineer but not trained. jonas - swedish - part of creating noisebridge. moved one month after noisebirth. moved to hong kong and did a hackerspace there. knows mitch + were at first meeting in shanghai hackerspace. went to beijing makerfaire. really cool. anyway. 463rd meeting! Nicolas - french. donjg a phd in communication sciences. learned about noisebridge from the web and wanted to see what we're doing. maybe wants to interview people. thex - used to be here a lot. moved to east bay. sudo room, now in omni commons. now has been hanging out here, hosting 5mof lizzie - electronics, security, non-alienating human interactions

announcements

thex - thursday, 5mof, makerfaire soiree with live entertainment, music, tours. please let people know! check out 5mof.com and event calendar. maybe one spot left! what's 5mof? 5 minutes of fame, noisebridge lightning talks. talk about anything. slides or no, spitball, make stuff up, interpretive dance? experimenting with 360 degree livestream if we can obfuscate audience. longstanding tradition with recent revivial. ryan - come to makerfaire! friday and runs through the weekend. mitch - busy week - a bunch of stuff. tomorrow is dorkbot at nimmylabs (sp?) in soma. thursday there's 5mof and also monthly hackaday event ("hardware developers didactic galactic"). one of the dorkbot speakers is early noisebridger. saturday after makerfaire there's a hackaday meetup at o'neil's irish pub. sunday there's an osh park bring-a-hack. thex - will be at noisebridge saturday and sunday. will be driving there for saturday and sunday and have 3ish open seats.

mitch - there's a few sections of the meeting that we go through and people can talk about them in their own words. people who have been here can pass along what they feel about noisebridge.

what does it mean for noisebridge to be safe space. Trent - victoria says that (and I agree) noisebridge being a safe space means the same thing in a physical sense as it does in the nonphysical. if you're going to start a really loud tool you should let people know to put on headphones. if you're going to talk about something sensistive, allow people to to avoid it. mitch - no one is in control. we're all empowered to make noisebridge a safe place.

how do people participate in noisebridge? ? - show up! mitch - that's a good start. hard to participate if you're not here. we also have email, wiki, and irc, but noisebridge is firstly a physical space of people doing the hard work of building a community that's worth being part of. how do you get here? you ring the door bell and you get a tour. you learn about what's physically in the space but also how it works, how it doesn't work, etc. if you like it you can be here as long as you follow our one rule. also, you can turn an rfid thing into a key. you get access from 11am to 10pm. it expires but can be renewed. if you want more responsibility you can become what we call a philanthropist. you can work it out to have 24h access. if you want more responsibility you can be come a member which we'll tlak about soon. trent - doocracy is about what doing what you want with the stuff you're working on, but also with noisebridge. if it's a non-revertible change, it's good to talk about things, though. but if it sounds good you should go for it. but if it sounds like a really big meal we can bring it up at a meeting and it can maybe be a consensus item.

[box of strawberries gets passed around]

mitch - a brief introduction of philanthropist. it doesn't mean you're a rich person giving a lot of money to noiserbridge. (but rich people are welcome to!) . for us it means someone who takes responsibility for the space, helping people who belong and showing people who don't belong the door. collectively noisebridge has its own point of view defined by our own view of what excellence is. we're all empowered to talk about excellence and help us get better. if someone wants to take more responsibility they can be a philanthropist. you're responsible for closing the space if you're the last person. if you want to be a philanthropist get a member to vouch for you and if no one objects in a meeting you become a philanthropist.

no new philanthropist applications for this week! there are some last week but we got confused.

thex - is there a way to nonmonetarily contribute for 24h access? mitch - we haven't worked it out explicitly but there's no reason that can't happen. we're an anarchist organization! trent - talk to john shutt. so yes! it has happened. and can happen again. thex - there shouldn't be a 1-1 correspondence between access to noisebridge and money.

who belongs at noisebridge? it's also subjective. you belong at noisebridge if you contribute to (not only financially) and benefit from the community. it's up to all of us to use our judgment. mainly we want to be positive. "be excellent to each other" vs "don't be evil".

membership! somewhat similar to philanthropist except membership in a california nonprofit has legal rights associated with it. members also get two things: 24h access, full participation in consensus process. if things get really out of hand in a discussion, they can block a consensus item. heavy responsibility and we want to make sure everyone who's a member can understand and work through. you fill out a form and get two people to vouch for you.

financial report!

john shutt is our treasurer. he gave a written financial report in slack:

   "for the meeting tonight: We have $84797.08 in the bank. Est. $30K of that is for Noisetor. $7,356.39 for the equipment fund. Several hundred for laser maintenance."
   about $47k for general fund, which is like 8mo of operating expenses. so we're doing ok! but we need 2mil more if we want a building.
   

consensus! that's how we make our decisions. who wants to talk about that? sofie - it's a very swedish thing. everything should be decided on with consensus. it doesn't always work that way but it tries to. at meetings we all have to agree or agree that we're not agreeing

mitch - with formal consensus, we have a meeting and the soonest we can move forward is the meeting after it. we don't normally use it, but we would use it for e.g. moving, building walls, etc. it's up to each person to decide if we want to do things doocratically bc the formal consensus process is a big deal. quite often we do things with small-c consensus. people discuss things and work it out and it just happens.it works better than democracy bc we want to avoid the situation where half the people are alienated. only members can technically block, bc in a healthy discussion things don't get out of hand. (but any member can block membership).

trent - we have 2 consensus items! electronically.

https://noisebridge.net/wiki/Current_Consensus_Items " 2017.05.15User:robbinttPhilanthropist status no longer expires when a monthly donation is not madeNoisebridge philanthropist status no longer expires if a monthly donation is no longer made. Instead, the philanthropist goes into hiatus where they neither pay dues nor have any properties of the Philanthropist role. Philanthropist status can be revoked as normal even while on hiatus.User:robbintt"

trent - automatic, vs membership hiatus. reduces burden. ? - how does that actually work? something in the payment ssystem? trent - hopefully it doesn't matter too much. mitch - btw, if at any time any member feels that a philanthropist isn't being excellent, status can be taken away. trent - if someone is being unexcellent we can ask them to leave regardless of status. jonas - does it solve an actual problem? trent - it created a situation where it was applied to someone in a way that wasn't fair in the past. just recently someone didn't pay for a while and we gave them 24h access. it creates an unfairness. we should treat everyone the same. mitch - since this is something in the manual, it's probably good to have consensus to change it rather than doocratically change the wiki.

we'll talk more next week!

"2017.05.15User:robbinttDefine Propagation of Access TokensActive Members and Philanthropists may have 24-hour access to Noisebridge through the RFID access control system. 30-day daytime access to the space through the RFID access control system can be activated by Members. 30-day daytime access to the space through the RFID access control system can be renewed by members and philanthropists.User:robbintt"

trent - currently consensed as being at the whim of the creators of the system. but we have a way that we've been doing it for a long time. this states that, but also gives philanthropists the ability to renew tokens. that way we have way more people around who can renew tokens. it doesn't have to be a consensus item, but thinks it would be good. so it creates the framework that we're using now through the consensus process but tacks on the other thing.

mitch - just some context :if someone has been coming around a bit, we th lizzie - has noticed cool people not being able to renew. mitch - btw, you don't need to be a member at noisebridge.

trent - so yeah. we don't need this to be a consensus item, but I think it would be cool. thex - more access-type-stuff: we used to have a pincode system that was a tree. so anyone with a code could create a code. but it was nifty because it was a tree, and you could kill whole trees. mitch - yeah that was a constantly-evolving system. we had dark days in 2014. noisebridge was being used as a terrible homeless shelter. we solved the problem by what we called the reboot. we kicked everyone out, took everything apart, sanded floors. "making noisebridge great again". unlike the reference there actually was a time when noisebridge was great. it worked really really well. since then there are a lot of things we've come up with to keep things moving forward. the tokens the x was talking about was one attempt but thinks that applying sofie - how does it work maintainance-wise? sounds like a lot of work. mitch - there are people that take ownership. people self-organize to make things happen. one person built it (henner) who mostly built it. lizzie - does it solve a problem? mitch - being able to hand out keys by anyone have keys seems cool. lizzie + mitch - we'll think about it more. trent - there's a network of people who share access who maybe shouldn't be.

trent - so that's the rest of the consensus item. ? - question about consensus: not all members are here, so how does that work? trent - some people may not ever hear about it. we have enough people engaged right now who have ideas and that people who would block such a thing would do it. it's not dependent on people who hear about it. mitch - doesn't have to be 100% of members that exist. a lot of people don't have strong opinions, just trust and respect people with opinions. this is kind of nitty-gritty procedural stuff that a lot of people don't care a whole lot lizzie - a lot of people read the meeting notes. thex - that's why it takes 2 weeks. so people can pass around the word. trent - there's no hurry. also might indicate that you're trying to pull a thing over on someone. jonas - they should all wear hats. trent - probably there will be a lot more discussion next week. [many hats are put on]

thex - edits to consensus to history. any consensus for director electrions last year. wonder if that got lost in the notes or what. mitch - we had an election last year. there should be a record of those. thex - there was consensus in 2015 but it just stopped. so it became procedural. mitch - we're required by law to have 5 board members and 3 officers. we're required by law to have them. those positions have responsibility but no power. all those people are people who want to take responsibility and liability. jonas - similar to thing in sweden. mitch - one of the attempts to fix problems in 2014. two board members out of 5 decided they were a majority. 2 weeks later they were gone. so something about noisebridge worked? maybe?

discussion items:

   + thex - housekeeping items. seem to be missing a current elevator permit.
   lizzie - talked to patrick about it, it's maybe being taken care of.

jonas - elevator is a landlord's problem.

   + mitch -there's this guy who's been emailing us named Sean. works for some nonprofit that makes agreements with restaurants in town. they have a day where if a nonprofit signs up with them, some percentage of the restaurant's profits go to noisebridge. it sounds cool but it takes a person to organize it.
      jonas - sales tactic for the restaurant?
 mitch - but could also be mutually beneficial.
 thex - what's the best way to follow up?
 mitch - emails with secretary@. also lady red thinks she may have a friend. 
thex - speaking of lady red, there's an interestng venue called monument in soma. if people are looking for another thing to do wednesday at monument they have a create night. "monument social club".

mitch - people live there! totally legal? very hospitable. + thex - thursday night. do we have any libation funds?

  mitch - if you or other people want to make it happen, you can maybe be reimbursed 

+ thex - wants a slackbot for infobanana so people can interact with slack. slack is not noisebridge. a lot of people invovled in noisebridge talk on slack. it would be cool to bend the conversation a bit. mitch - slack is for people in the space. if you know a person and are in the space, you can request an invite. + thex - let's imagine there's a hacker ambulance parked somewhere in the bay area that was parked in the bay area that could be revived. thinking about creating a fundraising project.

 mitch - we don't have a fiscal sponsorship program but we all seem to want it. mitch thinks it's cool.
 thex - has talked to john a little bit. apparently we have the ability to accept funds and earmark them for specific projects.
 mitch - on donate.noisebridge.net, anyone can donate to a specific  project. if you put the word out, money can come in.

+ ? - what kind of projects?

  mitch - "we want to buy a frobnitz generator"
  thex - original project was journalism.

mitch - thanks for being part of 364th meeting! thex - thanks for mitch and lizzie!

thex - also be excellent to each and party on.